Note from Hygeia — Dr. Michelle Perro is an integrative physician and healer who works in Marin County, California. She works with children and families facing developmental problems, ill health, and disease, and especially families that intuitively feel treating causes is better than masking symptoms. She is the Executive Director of the science-based website, www.gmoscience.org and a member of the Heartland Study’s Science Advisory Board.
In a continuation of the GM_List dialogue that triggered Michael Hansen’s guest blog on COVID-19 posted on July 23, 2020, Dr. Perro shared her experience and thoughts on why and how a new balance must be sought between prevention and treatment in order to live with COVID in our midst. This guest blog is a shortened version of Michelle’s July 25th post.
Bandaids, Immunological Chaos, and Living With COVID-19 in the Neighborhood
By: Dr. Michelle Perro
I’ve been meaning to respond to this thread to give you a practitioner’s point of view, but I’ve had so many autism cases this week that I was overwhelmed. I invite any politician, scientist, educator or know-it-all to sit it and just listen during a visit with a child with autism. It might change some perspectives.
On our COVID exchanges, I appreciate the dialogue and want to further the conversation. Please pardon my lack of scientific rigor, I am not going to do a citation heavy email…just my voice and what I’ve seen. I’ll be brief.
There are many COVID-19 treatment strategies in use and play around the world, some science based and practitioner vetted, others less so. It’s really hard to compare America with Taiwan, China or other Asian countries where herbal medicine (TCM, traditional Chinese medicine) is practiced side by side with conventional medicine. There are things people do and don’t necessarily share. Vitamin C is promoted unlike the anti-nutrient sentiment of the US.
Additionally, Americans’ health have been compromised for decades by a steady diet of GMOs/pesticides/processed and ultra-processed foods and liquor. The nutrient intake of most Americans is abysmal. We don’t have the metalloenzymes needed to optimally run our life-preserving systems.
No zinc? Your immune function works like a sputtering engine. Excessive reliance on antibiotics and their now routine presence in food and drinking water wreaks havoc with beneficial GI-tract microbes that help orchestrate gut-brain communications and run our biologic systems.
Budesonide, the drug used in one of the COVID therapies we recently discussed, is a steroidal anti-inflammatory. This class of meds can do almost magical things when injected into inflamed joints, or given to children with chronic inflammatory asthma. They can help some patients deal with autoimmune disorders and cancer, and lo and behold, can also work to suppress a cytokine-induced storm. They are a bandaid, of course, but can be life-saving when COVID is provoking and stoking our immunologic systems into sheer chaos. Yes, they work, but must be utilized along with other treatment modalities to not just put out the fire, but also restore health.
Not all drugs work by their proposed mechanisms. For example, hydroxychloroquine, promotes zinc entry into cells. I suspect azithromycin may sometime work in individuals that have lived for decades with chronic infections undiagnosed by conventional medicine, such as bartonella and rickettsia (ok, one citation).
In sum, we are facing a newly formed virus unknown/unrecognizable to our immune system, unleashed upon humans in a sickened terrain from toxicants and undernourishment, and people wonder why we are sick?
For those in integrative medicine, we have been using many tools in our tool box for decades such as herbal medicine, supplements, homeopathy, acupuncture, pharmaceuticals, various types of manipulative medicine such as osteopathy, etc. My best treatment results have been utilizing these tools and occasionally conventional tools as well. (Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is my best go-to pediatric advice!)
I have found that for those individuals with COVID, treating them early before it takes hold is ideal. I treat individuals, not diseases per se, with a prime focus on promoting health, including of course strong immune systems. Vit A, C and D, probiotics, silver, hydrogen peroxide and a no-sugar, organic only diet are definitely high on my list.
If you can prevent the virus from descending into the chest when it is just hanging out in your nose and throat, people reverse quickly. If it does descend, inhaled steroids, albuterol, glutathione and hydrogen peroxide have helped some very sick Lyme patients that got better quickly. Case study medicine works and I regret the day empiricism took hold over the art of medical practice.
